As a crush of enthusiastic dudes knocked into me in spastic reverie while watching Made in Mexico at a house show last week, I recalled how, mere hours before, the room had been empty save for a heap of cases and equipment and an inexplicable grocery cart filled to the brim with VHS cassettes of Korean porn. Prior to that, I had walked down a quiet residential street, approached the address I'd been given, found a handwritten note pinned to the door of the house ("Go around back for the show"), and followed its instructions, only to discover I was going to be That Guy: the dude who shows up for a party at the exact time the flyer says to show up. D'oh.

It was worth that minor agony for the ecstasy that was Made in Mexico's strange, intense aggregate of Latin grooves and noise rock. (This is, after all, a Providence band with former members of Arab on Radar and La Machine.) The bulk of the set was material from their new Guerillaton (Skin Graft), where they've turned down the AmRep knob and cranked up the Third World percussion. In this pumped and packed Allston basement, that meant mayhem.

Dead Kennedys punk battled with exuberant salsa madness, especially during the crazy extended drum breaks of "Gran Colombia." Guitarist Jeff Schneider — in a bandana and playing a guitar shaped like an AK-47, complete with a bandolero strap — spewed out crinkly and brittle shards while vocalist Rebecca Mitchell (half Elvira goth chick and half Yma Sumac) flipped casually and continually from seductive and emotive to demonic and aggressive. She climaxed with a new song, "Yes We Can," the band pausing for her to loose a torrent of wordless trills and ratchet the insanity up until, I shit you not, a kid to my right smashed a beer can on his forehead in revved-up glee. ¡Ay caramba!

Faulty Conscience | Good Enough for Punk Rock Of the innumerable punk bands who will release their debut full-length this year, Allston's Faulty Conscience will surpass the majority with their aptly titled Good Enough for Punk Rock .

Cloud Nothings | Attack on Memory With Attack on Memory , the third full-length from Cleveland-based Cloud Nothings, 20-year-old frontman Dylan Baldi approaches new, drastically darker material with the same empty-bottle angst that made his previous releases so appealing.

Smash It Dead Fest goes after rape culture Smash It Dead Fest happens this weekend in Allston and Cambridge, with three days of punk shows and feminist workshops to raise funds for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

From the bedroom to beyond with Craft Spells There's been an enormous wave of musicians gaining notoriety for creating work where they sleep, and subsequently seeing their star rise as blogs have picked up on the results.

Say Hi to I Love Music That photo with the high heels is so good you almost don't need to know anything else about Hi Tiger before taking the plunge with their music.

Rocktucket heats up the Bucket Are you ready for Rocktucket 2011? September marks the arrival of the 13th annual Pawtucket Arts Festival, popping up at various parks and venues around the Bucket for the next three weeks.

Out: We must protect this GHouse Tim Luckow clutches a beer, flashes a smile, and watches one of the cornerstones of his GHouse collective on stage at Great Scott.

The Men | Open Your Heart The Men — a four-piece post-punk band that began playing Brooklyn basements and national self-booked tours in 2008 — have accomplished a feat.

THE STROKES | COMEDOWN MACHINE | March 18, 2013 The Strokes burst out in a post-9/11 musical world with a sound that was compact and airtight, melodies coiled frictionlessly in beats and fuzzed vocals.

GLISS | LANGSOM DANS | February 01, 2013 If rock and roll is three chords and the truth, then the mutant genre offspring shoegaze can be summed up as one chord, three fuzzboxes, and a sullen, muttered bleat.